ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study of a two-year-old Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind prodigy, who presented with scarlet fever. Neither able to see nor hear, Laura Bridgman's intellectual life was limited to the books that she read and the people she interacted with through Howe's method of touch communication. Presumptivist theories offer one attempt in this direction. Levine has proposed a theory that he dubs the Truth Default Theory (TDT), which would seem to provide a great deal of empirical support for presumptivism with monitoring, including analogues of both of Reid's Principles of Veracity and Credulity. The central idea of the theory is the notion of the truth default. The chapter describes some general features of the ways that developmental psychologists test children's sensitivity to reliability. Children rapidly and spontaneously assess the comparative reliability of two unfamiliar informants and use that assessment over a protracted period to guide their judgments about which informant to ask and endorse.
